Nathan surprised me last Sunday by saying that he wanted to start school on Monday.  So we did!  We had a great first week and I wanted to brag on my boy a little!

Nate's reading has improved by leaps and bounds since the beginning of the summer.  I am amazed by what a couple of months can do for a child's reading ability.  His handwriting is coming along nicely as well.  Here is a picture of his copywork from this week.  He just started learning to write a couple of months ago, and we have not been consistent to practise, so I'm pretty pleased with this...

Photo can be seen here.

(OK - I give up!!  I've worked for over 2 hours trying to get my photos from picasaweb to post in here - they were on flickr before!! I switched because I read in the forums that flickr and photobucket should not be used! - so now I'm just linking to the images I want you to see!  If I figure this out, I'll come back and change) 

We are using Sonlight Core K this year.  I am also trying to incorporate the Charlotte Mason method.  Sonlight science and language arts both include activity sheets - aka: worksheets.  Since we are trying notebooking this year, I wanted to tweak the activity sheets to make them more Charlotte Mason friendly.  Here is the result.  These two pages were questions on the worksheets.  Nate cut and pasted the "Water Cycle" pictures and he colored the "Rainbow" page.  He then narrated to me his understanding of the water cycle and how rainbows form, and I wrote for him.  I used the large "writing tablet" lines so that Nate could see how his writing is supposed to look.

 Photo can be seen here and here.

I am very pleased with our first week of school.  It only took us about 2 hours per day to  complete all subjects except for math.  I'm still waiting to receive the math curriculum.  Evan is going to 4-H Mini Society Camp (I'll post about this next week) this week so he will not start school until next week.  It has been nice having this time where I can focus on Nathan alone and get into the swing of working with him as up until now we've done very little formal "school". 

Here is a very cute pic of my little scholar!

Until next time!

~Linda~